Cartier loses trademark dispute in Singapore

French jewellery company Cartier has lost its bid to have a trademark application incorporating the word ‘Love’ dismissed in Singapore.

Local pawnbroker MoneyMax applied to register the text ‘Love Gold’ beside two Chinese characters in January 2017. The mark is displayed within the stores and on the storefronts of MoneyMax’s outlets.

The decision was issued on December 20, 2018.

Cartier filed notice of its opposition to the application in July 2017, citing its registered trademark for the word ‘Love’ where the ‘o’ is replaced by a “slotted screw head” and the ‘e’ is in lower case.

Cartier’s trademark covers class 14, including jewellery and gold jewellery. The design on which the mark appears was used for a “love bracelet” released by Cartier in 1969.

The case was heard by Mark Lim Fung Chian, principal assistant registrar of trademarks at Intellectual Property Office of Singapore.

According to Lim, the only distinctive elements of Cartier’s trademark are the slotted screw head and “possibly” the lower case ‘e’, neither of which were present in MoneyMax’s mark.

He found that to reject the application on the grounds of similarity would have extended Cartier’s protection to the word ‘love’ itself.

Lim cited the opinion of Singaporean judge Chan Seng Onn in “the seminal decision” of Love & Co v The Carat Club in 2009. The judge found that the use of the word ‘love’ is “almost ubiquitous” in the jewellery trade and that it could not be reasonably expected to distinguish different traders’ goods.

Lim said that the word ‘love’ “should be free for traders to incorporate into their trademarks for jewellery”.

Cartier also argued that MoneyMax’s mark was not distinctive as the combination of the words ‘Love’ and ‘Gold’ “only adds to the descriptiveness of the goods and services”. Lim labelled this argument “clearly misguided”, saying that the distinctiveness of a mark “must be considered as a whole and not broken up into its component parts”.

Lim found that the words ‘Love’ and ‘Gold’ “enclosed in a rectangular device” with the Chinese characters rendered MoneyMax’s mark distinctive.

Cartier was ordered to pay legal costs to MoneyMax.